Saturday, 23 June 2012

Rape: guilty; sex: hung jury

So it’s not okay to sexually molest small children and/or to cover up for others when they do it. That’s good to know, and in a fairly lawless era when it is okay to torture adults and to steal their life savings, progress, of sorts.

The simultaneous decisions in the Jerry Sandusky case and the Father Lynn trial are a curious coincidence in a society that seems not to agree on much but is pretty united around adults keeping their horny mitts off minors. How have we managed to get here?

I perceive two normally hostile worldviews coming together: first, feminism, which awakened society to the deadly yet mostly hidden epidemic of rape and how pervasive it is, as well as its cultural cousins such as body objectification, sexual harassment and victim-blaming.

But if it were only that contingent demanding the heads of the Sanduskys and the Lynns, the outcomes probably would be far less emphatic and the punishments a good deal lighter. No, the Christian fundamentalists, who have spent 30 years trying to roll back the sexual revolution, recriminalize abortion, recloset gays and stop sex ed, have also joined the chorus. They were aghast, too, but less over the sadistic power trip involved in the abuse than for the sexualization of innocent, i.e., sexless, children.

Let us not forget that the Christians and their prosecutorial allies mounted the century’s second-worst witchhunt in the 1970s and ’80s during which many innocent adults were railroaded into prison on wholly fabricated charges, the McMartin and the Friedman cases being two of the more egregious. The surreal narratives built up around these allegations fit neatly into the Bible-thumper worldview, that fallen adults are eager to prey on our babies not yet cursed with menstruation, wanking and other signs of Original Sin.

If serial predators like Sandusky now can be sniffed out at an earlier stage of their crimes and denounced promptly, then we’ve learned a good lesson. I fear, however, that what remains unresolved is teenage sexuality itself. Criminalization, in our ever more litigious culture, is on the rise, both for what used to be a staple of adolescent trainwreckage like knocking up your girlfriend and, in my line of work, the sex lives of people with HIV. Sex researchers can’t even approach certain topics of the sexual behavior of minors (anyone under 18 years of age) as they will find themselves ostracized, threatened and looking for a new job.

So the alliance of feminist consciousness and Christian indignation has served us well in these cases, quite by accident. Meanwhile, the last abortion clinic in Mississippi is about to close, and one out of twelve teenagers in New York City carries the chlamydia virus. Rape is no longer a joke, but sex remains a minefield.